exploring the north

going away for the weekend again. indeed, the weekend is starting on a tuesday. you're jealous, i know. we're headed up to chiang mai for the weekend. well, assuming we get on the right van from suphanburi to bangkok, get a taxi from the center of bangkok to the big airport, find where we pick up our train tickets, hop in a taxi to the train station, and make it on our train by 10 pm, then we'll be in chiang mai tomorrow. there's a lot of room for mess ups/delays/really bad things to happen tonight en route. yeesh. i'm nervous eating right now.

anyway, i'm pretty sure we're gonna make it, and once we're up there i'm not gonna be on the internet. weird, i know, especially for this girl. so again, i apologize for the lack of updating and such, but i'll make it up to you on monday.

peace out, friends :-D

random side note: the most serious man in our office is blasting beyonce on his lap top right now. 555

karaoke

today's tahsh's 25th birthday (in america...in china, it'd be her 26th, apparently), so the night was up to her. her only goal? to sing karaoke.

but first we had to eat. obviously. because it's a main part of living here. so we went to a place just down the road, and then a hilarious thing happened. tahsh was enjoying her second dish of the night (number one was not delicious) when she bit down on something hard in her egg: a screw. a screw was sitting there in her egg, in the middle of her noodles. we laughed hysterically (i think i might have done a semblance of the seal laugh), then sunny told tahsh she should tell the cook.

so tahsh waves the cook over, points to the screw and asks, "what's that?"

"gung," (shrimp) the cook says first, like tahsh is some sort of idiot.

"no, that!" tahsh pointed again to the screw. the cook sort of looked at it funny, knew it didn't belong, and then stuck her fingers in the meal, took the screw out, and walked away like it was nothing. it wasn't a dainty little "ooo, i'm just going to stick the tips of my very clean fingers in here to fish out this gross thing! sorry!" the cook's dirty fingers slammed into the dish, touched more of the meal than was necessary and grabbed the screw like it was gonna jump back out of her hands.

after that whole fiasco, with sore abs and empty plates (yes, tahsh finished hers, mostly cuz she's a baller), mr wat, our thai man friend, met us at the dinner place so we could all go to karaoke together. he said he'd take us to the best place in town, and we trusted him, so off we went. the group sort of dwindled down so it was only sam, maddy, tahsh, mr. wat, and i going to the karaoke place. these people are easily my least favorite of everybody i know in the world, so i super wasn't looking forward to it, but whatever.

we pulled up to the fanciest hotel in suphanburi and headed to the 6th floor cuz we're super pimps. the fancy waitresses greeted us as we stepped out of the elevator and lead us to our own private karaoke room. I KNOW. hilarity ensued. tahsh is the greatest karaoke-ist i've ever seen.

birthdays are pretty neat in this country.

i guess i have a job?

i was accepted to the teach in thailand program in may. in july, i was given a placement in a thai school. in october, i flew to thailand with the intention of being trained as a teacher so i could work in said school. last week, i signed a contract saying i agreed to a bunch of terms as a teacher at this school. on paper, it looks exactly like i have a real-person job.

but if you looked at me and watched me for a while, you'd never guess that what i'm doing all day is working. this isn't one of those "oh my god, i just love my job soooooooo much!!! i would never call it WORK! it's the best thing ever!!!!111!!" literally, i hardly ever work. i have 3-5 classes a day, but we get time off all the time. i'm only working two days this week; last week, we only taught for a day and a half. i actually don't think we've had a full week of teaching yet.

even when we do have a full day, it's full of all this great stuff that's not teaching. like today's tahsh's birthday, so the teachers have been shoving food down our throats all day ("here, it's 9:15 am, have some fresh salad. keep eating it because there's a lot left. here, have some cake. here, have some ice cream on bread. here, have some pineapple. here, eat some cookies, they're your favorite. never stop eating, fat americans."). maddy went to her class at least 20 minutes late because we were singing happy birthday. don't worry, the teachers said; the kids will wait for you.

and even when i go to class, it's not like the teachers are expecting much of me. just play games and have the kids practice english for an hour. it doesn't matter what it is. just have them speak english. it'll be fine.

this job rules.